Page:The battle for open.pdf/26

 the message because it is open access and can be linked to and read by all.

It’s hard to predict or trigger these events, but a closed approach anywhere along the chain would have prevented it. It is in the replication of small examples like this across higher education that the real value of openness lies.

Is It a Battle?

Having hopefully gone some way to convincing you of the victory of openness and why the future direction of openness is significant, I now want to set out why I have used the term ‘battle’ and view it is a time of conflict. I know some readers will be uncomfortable with such militaristic language, but its use is deliberate in highlighting some of the significant factors about openness.

Firstly, there is a real conflict at the heart of the direction openness takes. We’ll explore this more throughout this book, but for many of the proponents of openness its key attribute is about ­freedom – ­for individuals to access content, to reuse it in ways they see fit, to develop new methods of working and to take advantage of the opportunities the digital, networked world offers. The more commercial interpretation of openness may see it as an initial tactic to gain users on a proprietary platform, or as a means of accessing government funding. Some see the new providers as entirely usurping existing providers in higher education, such as when Sebastian Thrun predicts there will be only ten global providers of education in the future (and he hopes his company, Udacity, is one of them) (The Economist 2012)

This is not a polite debate about definitions then; there will be very real consequences for education and society in general about who wins in the battle for openness. This highlights the second